This is in memory of two really good people
Two really good friends:
Andrea Esser
&
Chase Schweitzer
By: Bryanna Brooke Cavanaugh
Prologue
“We’ll make it through this together, whether she makes it or not.”
Some days it’s really difficult, difficult to imagine that just a few months ago we had to go through something so traumatic. Some days I really wish that it was all just a sick joke and we could be angry for a while. But I know there is no happy ending, and now we have to pick up the pieces.
Chapter One
The morning of June 13th, 2013 started off like any regular morning with an amazing girl you could call your best friend, her name is Savanah, and she had slept over at my house a lot over the 2013 summer break. We were standing in my living room talking merrily, school was out for the summer and Savanah, and our two other really good friends Tierney, and Andrea had just graduated only two weeks before this June morning. We were singing on my Wii, more specifically we were playing a Glee Kareokee Game. Savanah and I are obsessed with Glee, and laughing at my families antics, when Savanah’s phone rang; it was someone, but someone with not good news. Savanah kept talking to the unknown human on the other end while my entire family was watching alarmed, I kept asking who it was and what was wrong but I knew she was focused on the words from the phone and not me, but soon enough throughout that phone call she told me that it was Tierney on the phone and Andrea and her fiancée who had graduated a year earlier had gotten in an accident and that was that. We didn’t know much, but what we did know hurt. Chase was dead, and Andrea wasn’t looking too good. He was found dead at the scene of the accident and she we didn’t know. But that wasn’t the worst part to me, the worst part was is that they drove all the way to Wyoming, and had an accident. We didn’t know then that it was suicide but I felt the depression, and the guilt easing its way into my heart. Because only a few days before Savanah had told me that Andrea was missing but we blew it off, we always did when she was gone for long periods of time. This time though I had said that they probably went off to Las Vegas to elope, because they had agreed that after she graduated, they would get married.
But a marriage didn’t happen and neither one of them came back to us, we waited by the phone, on facebook, news articles… Anything to let us know something of their story to how he died, to how extensive her injuries were and all I hoped was that he didn’t suffer, that it was sudden and he didn’t feel it.
But before all of this, there was obviously our beginning. So allow me to begin with how we all met, and how these people changed my life, made me better, and most of all: kept me alive. It started the first few months my sophomore year, the previous year, 6 days before school started my best friend, my dog Saily died. She was the rock during my parents divorce began and I felt so guilty for her death that I wanted to die myself, but I kept it low to cutting my right wrist with scissors. I auditioned for the two plays the drama club did my freshman year, but I didn’t get it, so when sophomore year rolled up and the old Drama teacher, Mr. Dodd’s left and Ms. Kimball, and Ms. Doran a math teacher took over, I was ecstatic! I was on really good terms with Ms. Kimball, and I felt that I would have a better chance of making the play now that she was a part of it. The play was called F.A.U.G.H, Fine Arts Under Graduate Housing.. It was a play about a dysfunctional college dorm with equally as dysfunctional college kids, for example: A student who had been there nine years and was still a freshman, a crazy painter (Me), a person with multiple personalities, a boy who had a sand crab, named Seymour to whom he thought could sing, a computer nerd, the thing was though Andrea’s character was in love with the computer nerd and wrote messages on the computer to get the boy to notice her, but the boy thought the computer could talk, and Chase’s character, Vince, played my characters boyfriend. Savanah played the, not the host but the “Dorm mom” if you will, and was very eccentric. It’s where I met them and when Chase died, I remember looking up to the sky and whispering “Rest In Peace, Vince” because my debut of high school theatre was with them, my first onstage boyfriend was him and he was dead, I met the girl (Savanah) that if I allowed myself (After Saily’s death, I refused to have a girl best friend, I still don’t) who could be my best friend. So it made it so much worse when his funeral rolled around, and I wished I couldn’t feel, that I could just suppress all the sadness I felt, I longed to forget this ever happened. I wanted to go back to the last day I saw Andrea, how she said “See you later” so casually, like she didn’t know then that “See you later” would never come. How I sat in the Pews of a church I didn’t go to, for a faith I don’t much know how to care for and listen to a really nice woman, the priest talk about how much of a great kid he was. I won’t forget looking at the collages of pictures and listening to the chorus of my friends talk about him and their memories. I won’t forget two friends going up front to talk about him, and me being close to tears as they did. Because I knew that it hurt them. It hurt me to see them hurt and in that moment,I hated Chase. I hated them both, because we were left to collect our shattered hearts and keep moving on the march called life. Seeing pictures of them both, or just Andrea and wondering if I would ever see her alive again or if the last time I saw her would be a senior picture on a table next to a closed casket or a silvery urn containing the ashes of a friend I once knew. It killed me. I remember it all so well, so well sometimes that it feels like I’m back on that day, June 18th, 2013. A tuesday I won’t soon forget. I woke up feeling numb, got dressed in a red shirt with shapes littering the fabric, and a black skirt. I wore the shirt for my great grandparents funeral, so I took to calling it my funeral shirt and now I waited for Ms. Kimball, Tierney, and my school band teacher to pick Savanah, Tierney and myself up from my house, as Savanah had spent the night at my place and take us out to the Arkdale Lutheran Church. I felt tense, I don’t know about the rest and I knew it wouldn’t be easy to go through but I wanted to try my hardest not to cry. When Ms. Kimball arrived at my house it seemed light and airy, and I felt the foreshadowing sadness trying to seep in, but I couldn’t let it. I couldn’t cry.
